Games we play

“You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t even quit the game.”
~ Ginsberg’s Theorems, Murphy’s Law

If every play or move were perfectly executed under perfect, textbook conditions, there would be no game, no reason to play and compete. The point of the game is for one player to outsmart or outplay the other, and this can’t happen if both players play perfectly all the time, making perfect decisions within perfect opportunities, without imperfect obstacles.

Often, I mention the absence of a level playing field, but does life provide such a thing? After putting some thought into this, I conclude that level playing fields don’t exist. We’re always attempting to outplay, defend against, or control a so-called opponent or adversary.

In works of fiction, there are traditionally 7 possible core conflicts/games, one or two of them comprising a specific work, including Character vs. Character, Character vs. Society, Character vs. Nature, Character vs. Technology, Character vs. Supernatural, Character vs. Fate, and Character vs. Self. I mention these, as they seem to cover the entire range of possible conflicts/games that influence our lives in the real world. Although, I think there should be an eighth possible conflict/game: Character vs. God.

Which one, two, or three of these exert(s) the most influence over your life?

Henry Miller’s Paris

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”
~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Found this intriguing quote on social media, but with no context to it, which makes it difficult to understand what Henry Miller was thinking and feeling about Paris and why, especially since I’ve not read his work. Although, I’ve been told by a reader that Henry Miller was very passionate about Paris, noticing both the light and dark sides to it, which inspired his writing.

I suppose it is possible that his expectations or hopes for Paris were derailed by reality in some sense, leaving him with the impression of being lured into a place that produced the opposite side of his desired Paris, and dredging up the darkness or shadows within him. Kind of like a psychological bait and switch, where the imagined or advertised fantasy of a place is nothing like its reality, resulting in unintended consequences and entanglements. I can personally relate to this.

Note: Adding Henry Miller to my bucket list of authors to read!

Timeless

“We cannot apply our notion of time to the unconscious. Our consciousness can conceive of things only in temporal succession, our time is, therefore, essentially linked to the chronological sequence. In the unconscious this is different, because there everything lies together.”
~Carl Jung

Facebook meme:
“Sorry I just saw your text from last night,
Are you guys still at restaurant?”
~ Thomas Lélu, Lacan Circle of Australia

I chuckled upon my first reading of this meme, my initial reaction being that the text writer was still waking up and had not yet recovered a sense of time—past versus present. You know, that foggy haze we sometimes wake up with, being confused as to where we are and what time it is.

However, just maybe this fictional text message is more complex than meets the eye, suggesting the way we sometimes hold on to images, thoughts and memories that continue to affect us, as if they are timeless and continue to exist or haunt us in the present, like an echo of something that seems as real today as it was yesterday. Dreams often operate on this level, combining images of the past and present from different places; the dream depicting them as occurring at the same time and in the same space.

Some psychologists and physicists believe that everything is happening in the here and now, and it is only our minds that divide them into past, present, future, and separate spaces.

Are time and space convenient illusions? What about cause and effect? Try to imagine a lifetime of relationships, people, things, places, events and situations existing together in the here and now; no need to separate any of it into past, present, future, spatial distances, or causes and effects. Impossible?

Nothingness

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
~ Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

The concept of NOTHINGNESS is extremely difficult to imagine or wrap ideas around.

How could there be NOTHING, not even the void of space, since a void could not exist if there were nothingness? What would nothingness be like if we could perceive it through vision, hearing, smell, touch?

Whenever I attempt to imagine nothingness, I think of a darkness that is darker than darkest black I’ve ever seen; no light or sound whatsoever, nowhere to move to or towards, like being buried alive six feet under or death itself. Yet, how could there be colors and darkness if there were nothing or nothingness? How can nothingness be described, explained or written about, if never experienced or observed? Even more imponderable, is the idea that “SOMETHING” could come into existence from this nothingness.

Note: I’m using NOTHING and NOTHINGNESS interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference. NOTHING refers to the absence of specific things, whereas NOTHINGNESS refers to a state of non-existence, non-being; an existential, all-encompassing void.

Continue reading “Nothingness” →

Thoughts on projection

“Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.”
~ Jacque Fresco

Many psychologists believe in a specific end goal to therapy, which is to consciously take back ownership of all that we’ve been projecting into the world and onto others—referred to as individuation in Jungian theory. Yet, I wonder what would happen to humanity if we projected nothing outside of ourselves, re-internalizing (introjecting) all of the feelings, motives, imaginings, and conflicts formerly experienced as occurring outside of us or between us and others. Would this in effect nullify the need for an outside world of things, people, events, and situations? Would we still perceive an outside world at all, or exist entirely within ourselves? Is the outside world merely one big projection or imagining of all that stirs within us? I cannot definitely answer these questions, simply because I don’t know the answers—nobody does.

There is an ongoing debate going on, as to whether an objective, relatively unchanging reality exists—regardless of whether or not we observe it—or if so called reality shapeshifts to fit our expectations and projections. Some quantum physicists have concluded that reality exists one way when not observing it, and another way when we observe it, the exact form depending upon the inclinations of the observer. In layman’s terms, what we see is what we expect to see.

Continue reading “Thoughts on projection” →